In this week’s episode Purvi (Vi) Gandhi shares her knowledge about implementing effective and evidence based strategies to improve mental health or mental fitness in schools.

Vi has recently published a book 'A little guide for teachers: Student Mental Health' with lots of ideas of how teachers can support the mental health and fitness of the young people in schools. In this interview we discuss the language we use around mental health, why mental health is so important in school and how we can support our pupils to thrive and much more.

If you would like to find out more about her book here is the link: uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/author/purvi-gandhi

If you want to hear more podcasts on mental health from Psychology in the classroom here is the link: https://changingstatesofmind.com/mental-health-%26-wellbeing

On World Mental Health day 2024 Psychology in the Classroom discusses Mindfulness. We eschew the ‘Crystals and Muesli’ version and reframe it to ask how to be more attentive, calmer, more grounded, more aware, more responsive, less anxious. Willem Kuyken and Maggie Farrar join me to discuss, how we can make moments in our day to be mindful and how this can help us align ourselves better with our personal values.

You can find the podcasts on the Myriad Trial into Mindfulness in schools via this link: https://changingstatesofmind.com/mindfulness-miniseries

This is the link to Willem’s website and book: https://mindfulnessforlife.uk/

This is the link to Maggie’s website and book: https://www.empoweringleadership.co.uk/

In this final summary interview with Prof. Dr. Suzanne Narciss, we review all our learning about failure over the last few months. There is much we can do to encourage our students to learn from errors, including interactive formative assessment and feedback strategies, prompting reflection and adaptive strategies for dealing with errors and using other people’s errors. As teachers we need to help students overcome their fear of failure by creating a positive error climate and supporting students to develop a more positive error mindset. But this is an area that is challenging to research and we still have much to learn.